Masks and Staffs: Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields by Michaela Pelican. New York: Berghahn, 2015. 258 pp.
[A version of this review was originally published in November 2016 in the journal, American Anthropologist, 118: 849–850. doi:10.1111/aman.12731]
What does it mean to belong, to have outgrown one’s “outsiderness,” to claim or assert a set of identities, especially as a minority in a region legendary for its ethnic diversity and deeply hierarchical structures? This overarching question, it seems to me, animates and sustains the main narrative in Michaela Pelican’s monograph Masks and Staffs. At issue is the evolving and contentious relations between the Mbororo, the Hausa (both Muslim minorities), and the dominant “Grassfielders”—the latter, composed of a conglomerate of territories, lumped under a single ethnic label in the book. While Cameroon is celebrated in the tourism literature for its ethnic diversity, it is apt to state that the Western Grasslands epitomize this diversity par excellence; this was even more so the case at the turn of the 20th century as a result of the migration of the Hausa and Mbororo agropastoralists (from Northern Nigeria) into various Grasslands kingdoms. Although these two groups have lived in the Grasslands for almost a century, the academic literature on them is relatively puny, especially those devoted to themes other than their history and migration trajectories. Hence, this makes Pelican’s monograph all the more necessary and significant. Guided by the anthropological quest to explore and understand human relations and cultures in context, Pelican pursues this objective by investigating the ways in which the Mbororo and Hausa have cohabited with “Grassfielders,” especially in Misaje, a small town in the northeast of the present North West region.
At least two main theoretical currents converge in this work—one classical, the other more contemporary. With respect to the classical thread, Pelican returns to Max Gluckman’s thesis about the salience of “cross-cutting ties” in the promotion of group cohesion in multiethnic contexts. Cross-cutting ties are simply mechanisms, strategies, and allegiances that unite individuals across ethnic or social units. While not fully explored in the book, these cross-cutting ties in the Grasslands include marriage, forms of tributary, reciprocal exchanges, and, in many cases, appeals to common Tikar descent (especially in the author’s field area). Although Pelican finds elements of Gluckman’s thesis worthy of consideration in light of her data, she concludes that “cross-cutting ties in themselves have no general effect, but used as raw material for political rhetoric, they may promote either social cohesion or violent conflict” (p. 8). The other thread that runs through the monograph is the recent surge in identity politics occasioned by political liberalization in the 1990s, as well as the proliferation in rights discourses at the global level. These national and global discourses have inspired a new generation of educated and elite Mbororo who now champion and defend the rights of Mbororo not only as minorities but also as indigenous peoples within the Cameroon state. In this vein, Pelican conceives ethnicity as “essentially relational and processual,” as seen in some of the conflicts that have prevailed between the Mbororo and Nchaney citizens in the Misaje area (p. 5). Pelican suggests that one of the main reasons full-scale violence has not erupted between these ethnic groups is largely on account of what she terms functional indifference—“a strategy that opts for overlooking difference and rivalry for the sake of continued coexistence” (p. 10). Ultimately, her analysis rests on the ways in which ethnic “Others,” such as the Mbororo and the Hausa, are integrated into Grasslands society while maintaining their religious and cultural difference.
Masks and Staffs is a critical analysis of the changing relationships between the Muslim Hausa and Mbororo groups versus “Grassfielders”—relationships strained by farmer-herder conflicts, stereotyping, and complementary modes of subsistence. The work’s strongest features include the insights gained from the analyses of Nchaney, Mbororo, and Hausa ethnicities, informed by Fredrik Barth’s constructivist and interactionist approaches—this, in large measure because the book conveys the contingency and fluidity of the distinct but multiple identities claimed by or ascribed to the ethnic groups in question. The monograph demonstrates the critical need for more anthropological studies of Mbororo and Hausa identities across the Grasslands, especially as many of their youths migrate to urban centers. Perhaps more contentious is Pelican’s claim that a “significant feature of farmer-herder relations in the Cameroon Grassfields is the apparent disjunction of corresponding discourses and practices, and the general tendency to frame economic conflict in ethnic terms” (p. 132). At the heart of the farmer-herder conflicts are issues of class and power and, most significantly, the role of state agents in their propagation. The invocation of ethnicity rather than the state’s excesses or outright neglect seems overdetermined and unsupported by evidence beyond Misaje, particularly when such a conclusion aspires to be valid for the Grassfields as a whole. Furthermore, uncritical usage or references to colonial claims about “pacifying” the Grassfields does such a disservice to the region’s history and its peoples and most importantly betrays the narrative as a “pacifier’s” version of history (pp. 140-141). This notwithstanding, Masks and Staffs is a much-welcomed monograph that builds on and advances the corpus of knowledge about the evolution and dynamics of interethnic relations in the Cameroon Grasslands.
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